Trivia: Chuck Connors attended Seton Hall University before embarking on a career in professional sports. He first played basketball with the Boston Celtics, then baseball with the Brooklyn Dodgers and Chicago Cubs. Hardly a spectacular player -- while with the Cubbies, he hit .233 in 70 games -- Connors was eventually shipped off to Chicago's Pacific Coast League farm team, the L.A. Angels. Here his reputation rested more on his cut-up antics than his ball-playing prowess. While going through his usual routine of performing cartwheels while rounding the bases, Connors was spotted by a Hollywood director, who arranged for Connors to play a one-line bit as a highway patrolman in the 1952 Tracy-Hepburn vehicle Pat and Mike. Finding acting an agreeable and comparatively less strenuous way to make a living, Connors gave up baseball for films and television. One of his first roles of consequence was as a comic hillbilly on the memorable Superman TV episode "Flight to the North." In films, Connors played a variety of heavies, including raspy-voiced gangster Johnny O in Designing Woman (1957) and swaggering bully Buck Hannassy in The Big Country (1958). He switched to the Good Guys in 1958, when he was cast as frontiersman-family man Lucas McCain on the popular TV Western series The Rifleman. During the series' five-year run, he managed to make several worthwhile starring appearances in films: he was seen in the title role of Geronimo (1962), which also featured his second wife, Kamala Devi, and originated the role of Porter Ricks in the 1963 film version of Flipper. After Rifleman folded, Connors co-starred with Ben Gazzara in the one-season dramatic series Arrest and Trial (1963), a 90-minute precursor to Law and Order. He enjoyed a longer run as Jason McCord, an ex-Army officer falsely accused of cowardice on the weekly Branded (1965-1966). His next TV project, Cowboy in Africa, never got past 13 episodes. In 1972, Connors acted as host/narrator of Thrill Seekers, a 52-week syndicated TV documentary. Then followed a great many TV guest-star roles and B-pictures of the Tourist Trap (1980) variety. He was never more delightfully over the top than as the curiously accented 2,000-year-old lycanthrope Janos Skorzeny in the Fox Network's Werewolf (1987). Shortly before his death from lung cancer at age 71, Chuck Connors revived his Rifleman character Lucas McCain for the star-studded made-for-TV Western The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw (1993).

Trivia: A former Mousketeer, Johnny Crawford is best remembered for playing young Mark McCain on The Rifleman (1958-1963). His career slowed after he reached adulthood when he was relegated to supporting roles.

Trivia: Husky, bushy-mustached, frequently unkempt Canadian actor Jack Kruschen appeared steadily on radio from 1938 onward. He began playing small film roles in 1949, often cast as minor villains and braying bullies. He became a cult favorite after playing one of the three earliest victims (the Hispanic one) of the Martian death ray in George Pal's War of the Worlds (1953). His larger film roles included MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer in the Carol Lynley version of Harlow (1965), and the remonstrative physician neighbor of Jack Lemmon in Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960); the latter assignment copped a "Best Supporting Actor" Oscar nomination for Kruschen. A tireless TV performer, Kruschen has guested in a variety of roles on most of the top video offerings, and was a regular in the 1977 sitcom Busting Loose, playing the father of Adam Arkin. Relatively inactive after 1980, Jack Kruschen made a welcome return in PBS' 1993 adaptation of Arthur Miller's The American Clock.

Trivia: Following his screen debut in 1949's Twelve O'Clock High, Richard Anderson was groomed for stardom at MGM. His stature in Hollywood seemed assured when he married the daughter of former MGM luminary Norma Shearer. But Anderson was -- by his own admission -- a less-than-noble figure in his younger days, losing both prestige and several plum film roles through his arrogance, his explosive temper, and his after-hours carousing. A kinder, mellower Richard Anderson resurfaced on television in the 1970s, gaining a modest but loyal fan following thanks to his weekly appearances as Oscar Goldman in The Six Million Dollar Man. Anderson also played Goldman on the spin-off series The Bionic Woman -- the result being that, for several years in the mid-1970s, he was simultaneously co-starring on two different TV series in the same role. Richard Anderson's additional TV-series stints included Mama Rosa (1950), Bus Stop (1961), Dan August (1970), Cover-Up (1984) and Dynasty (1986-87 season).